In March 2007, I wrote a post with this title: “New Brendan Benson?: Feel Like Taking You Home.” More than two years later, you can take off the question mark. A new album, called My Old, Familiar Friend, is due for release Aug. 18 on ATO. If you’re scoring at home, that’s four-plus years since we last heard a Brendan Benson solo project, 2005’s The Alternative to Love. (Of course, Benson has been busy with the Raconteurs, a worthwhile excuse for such a wide gap between solo releases.)

If I recall correctly, the version of Feel Like Taking You Home that I posted in 2007 was a demo/rough edit that he posted to his MySpace page. (You know, the good ol’ days when songs were downloadable off that site.) Stereogum debuted the proper studio version – a finished product that very closely resembles the demo cut – and I’ve reposted below. (If you really want that rough cut, drop me an e-mail .)

• Brendan Benson | Feel Like Taking You Home

Here’s the tracklisting for My Old, Familiar Friend (album artwork shown above), which was produced by Gil Norton:

1. A Whole Lot Better
2. Eyes on The Horizon
3. Garbage Day
4. Gonowhere
5. Feel Like Taking You Home
6. You Make a Fool Out of Me
7. Poised and Ready
8. Don’t Want to Talk
9. Misery
10. Lesson Learned
11. Borrow

The 43rd installment of I Used to Love H.E.R., a series in which artists/bloggers/writers discuss their most essential or favorite hip-hop albums and songs, comes from Nick Andre, a Bay Area DJ/producer and co-founder of Slept On Records who has worked with, among others, artists from Quannum and Living Legends. His newest project is City Light, which recently toured with and recorded a split covers EP with Her Space Holiday.

• City Light | All You Demons

The Pharcyde
Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde
(Delicious Vinyl, 1992)

I got Bizarre Ride on cassette tape during a summer trip in seventh grade to my cousin’s house in S.D. This was the first “underground” hip-hop album I owned. That summer my cousin and I got really into smoking weed so Pack the Pipe was kind of an anthem for us that summer. Bizarre Ride had such a unique sound to me from the different vocal tones of Fat Lip, Tre, Brown and Imani to the simple but extremely catchy hooks. They even manage to make a entire song out of Ya Mama jokes.

As I got older I got obsessed with going to as many hip-hop shows as possible and began to find out about similar artists such as Hieroglyphics, Living Legends, Project Blowed, etc. Right after high school, I saved up my money and purchased an MPC 2000XL and decided to take a shot at making beats. This became my new obsession. As I progressed and became more confident about what I was making, I started giving beat tapes to local MCs in the Bay Area. This led to being able to work and tour as a DJ with some of the artists I had grown up listening to such as Medusa (Project Blowed), OMNI (BLX), Bicasso (Living Legends) and more. About 10 years after I had purchased Bizarre Ride, I found myself backstage at a Pharcyde show we were main support for, drinking Hennessy with Jern Eye and getting so drunk that we ended up on stage singing the chorus to Passin’ Me By … doesnt get much better than that.

• The Pharcyde | Passin’ Me By
• The Pharcyde | Ya Mama